THE ECONOMIC EFFECT OF VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENT.
[To riff Maros or ran "Srocrrroa..]
Six,—In your keine of October 10th last you published a letter from me entitled "The Biological Effect of Voluntary Enlistment." It is now transpiring that there is another effect, previously overlooked or looked at from a different standpoint, and that is the eC07101117.C. Of the two this latter is perhaps the more serious because the more immediate.
When there is an urgent call to arms, under a system of voluntary enlistment, it is the men of the beat calibre who join the colours first. These are the men who either are, or are capable of becoming, skilled mechanics. Thus a large number of them are suddenly diverted from positions and occupations from which, it is subsequently discovered, they can ill be spared. The men who chiefly compose the large armies being put into the field are, to a great extent, the very men now wanted to maintain the particular armies they form. I believe this is an additional reason for the shortage of muni- tions of war deplored by Lord Kitchener in the Upper Home the other day.
Munitions of war—particularly arms and ammunition—can only be manufactured by skilled mechanics, and these can only be produced by a long apprenticeship. With intensive training an unskilled labourer can be turned into a tolerably good soldier in about six months, but it would take as many years to turn him into a skilled mechanic. Lately I have heard several men, engaged in the manufacture of munitions of war, remark upon the disparity in the supply of skilled and unskilled labour. One who latterly has had to undertake the production of ordnance expressed the wish that an exchange could be effected between many of the men who had not enlisted and some of those who joined at the commence- ment of the war. The unskilled man, he said, can be made efficient enough during the course of the war to take his stand in the trenches, but be cannot be made really effective in the same period of time for the purpose of producing the com- plicated mechanism of modern guns.
Now, under a system of voluntary enlistment, especially in the case of a sudden emergency, a country is obliged more or less to take those who first come forward or else be short of men. Under a system of compulsory service a freer exercise of discrimination is possible on account of the number of men liable to serve exceeding the number actually required at any particular time. Both biologically and economically voluntary enlistment is a most extravagant form of national defence, and is tantamount to living on capital—moral and intellectual.
—I am, Sir, ROBERT T. &TUBBER, St. Peter's Vicarage, Loughborough.
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